‘The Compages, the Bonds and Rivets of the Race’: W. E. Gladstone on the Keeping of Books

ABSTRACT

For the great Victorian Liberal statesman and Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone, books were the ‘voices of the dead’ and ‘a main instrument of communication with the vast human procession of the other world’. Gladstone's 1890 article ‘On Books and the Housing of Them’ combines a celebration of the value and civilizing influence of books with practical suggestions for the organization of an academic library. Unlike such contemporaries as Sir Thomas Phillipps and the Earls of Crawford, Gladstone was a book-lover rather than a bibliomane, who bought books for their contents rather than their rarity or beauty. The residential library of St. Deiniol's, North Wales (now renamed Gladstone's Library), which he established towards the end of his life primarily to serve the needs of Anglican clergymen, follows the spirit of his 1890 paper and adopts many of its practical suggestions. Like Antonio Panizzi of the British Museum, his friend of many years, Gladstone was particularly concerned with the problem of how libraries could accommodate the ever-increasing number of books without becoming mere book warehouses. Gladstone's solution was to shelve books according to their ‘sociability’, so that less sociable items could be relegated to mobile shelving or other maximum-density storage areas. Libraries, for Gladstone, should be not only well-organized and efficiently run repositories of research material but friendly and welcoming centres of scholarship and meeting places for readers. In a well-run library, scholars should be able to enjoy the society of books and of one another. Gladstone's Library continues to this day to realize the high ideals set by its founder, providing to researchers the opportunity for scholarly collaboration which Gladstone though essential in the evening of the age of the solitary scholar.

KEYWORDS:

• W. E. Gladstone
• St Deiniol's
• Gladstone Library
• Antony Panizzi
• Sir Thomas Phillipps
• Bernard Quaritch
• Richard of Bury

Notes

1. Mary Drew, ‘Mr. Gladstone's Library at “St. Deiniol's Hawarden”’, Nineteenth Century, 60 (1906): 944–54 (947).

2. William Ewart Gladstone, ‘On Books and the Housing of Them’, Nineteenth Century, 27 (1890): 384–96 (384).

3. Ibid., 386.

4. Ibid., 385.

5. Ibid., 386.

6. Ibid., 395.

7. Ibid., 385.

8. Richard of Bury, The Philobiblon, translated by E. C. Thomas, 10, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/626/626-h/626-h.htm (accessed 27 November 2016).

9. M. R. James, ‘A Neighbour's Landmark’, in Collected Ghost Stories (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1992), 514–32 (514).

10. W. E. Gladstone, ‘On Books and the Housing of Them’, 389.

11. T. W. Pritchard, A History of St Deiniol's Library (Hawarden: Monad Press, 1999), 17.

12. For a fuller account of Panizzi's work at the British Museum, see Edward Miller, ‘Antonio Panizzi and the British Museum’, British Library Journal 5, no. 1 (1979): 1–17.

13. M. R. D. Foot, ‘Gladstone and Panizzi’, British Library Journal 5, no. 1 (1979): 48–56 (48).

14. Eric Glasgow, ‘Sir Anthony Panizzi’, Library Review 50, no. 5 (2001): 251–54 (251).

15. Quoted in Pritchard, 9.

16. Richard Shannon, Gladstone: Heroic Minister:1865–1898 (London: Allen Wood, 1999), 476.

17. Peter J. Jagger, ‘Gladstone and His Library’, in Gladstone, edited by Peter J. Jagger (London and Rio Grande: The Hambledon Press, 1998), 235–53 (243).

18. Pritchard, 10.

19. Roy Jenkins, Gladstone (London: Macmillan, 1995), 625–26.

20. Pritchard, 10.

21. Even before the Vatican Council of 1870 (which approved the notorious dogma of papal infallibility), the Syllabus of Errors published in 1864 had already condemned, alongside many other targets, the view ‘that the Roman Pontiff ought to come to terms with progress, liberalism, and modern civilization’ (quoted by Gladstone in his 1874 pamphlet The Vatican Decrees in Their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Political Expostulation [London: John Murray], 18). The absurdity and ultimate futility of Pius IX's attempt to stop the clock of civilization were forcefully brought out in Gladstone's anti-papal diatribe. (For further discussion of Gladstone's reaction to the Vatican decrees, see my ‘Fallible Infallibility? Gladstone's Anti-Vatican Pamphlets in the Light of Mill's On Liberty’, Victorian Literature and Culture 44, no. 2 (2016): 223–37.

22. Pritchard, 12.

23. Eric Glasgow, ‘St. Deiniol's Library, Hawarden’, Library Review 46, no. 2 (1997): 113–21 (119).

24. Jenkins, 565.

25. The original source of Gladstone's letter to Quaritch is D. Williamson, Gladstone the Man (London: James Bowden, 1898). I am indebted to Glasgow, ‘St Deiniol's Library, Hawarden’, which reprints portions of the letter.

26. W. E. Gladstone, The Gladstone Diaries, edited by H. C. G. Matthew (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), vi, 378.

27. Glasgow, ‘St Deiniol's Library, Hawarden’, 115.

28. Ibid.

29. Nicholas Barker, Bibliotheca Lindesiana: The Lives and Collections of Alexander William, 35th Earl of Crawford and 8th Earl of Balcarres, and James Ludovic, 26th Earl of Crawford and 9th Earl of Balcarres (London: Bernard Quaritch, for the Roxburghe Club, 1977), 38.

30. [Anon.], ‘The “Bibliotheca Lindesiana”’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 30, no. 1 (1946): 185–94 (190).

31. Barker, 283.

32. Quoted in Werner Muensterberger, Collecting: An Unruly Passion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 74; the capitals are Phillipps's own.

33. Ibid., 94.

34. Barker, 239.

35. Muensterberger, 91.

36. Alan G. Thomas, Great Books and Book Collectors (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1975), 264.

37. Frederick W. Ratcliffe, ‘Mr Gladstone, the Librarian, and St Deiniol's Library, Hawarden’, in Gladstone, Politics and Religion: A Collection of Founder's Day Lectures Delivered at St Deiniol's Library, Hawarden, 1967–83, edited by Peter J. Jagger (London: Macmillan, 1985), 49.

38. Gladstone, ‘On Books and the Housing of Them’, 394.

39. Ratcliffe, 59–60.

40. Richard of Bury, 20.

41. Gladstone, ‘On Books and the Housing of Them’, 395.

42. Ibid., 396.

43. Ibid., 395.

44. Ibid., 384.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid., 385–86.

47. Ibid., 386.

48. Ibid.

49. Drew, 944–45.

50. Gladstone, ‘On Books and the Housing of Them’, 386.

51. Richard of Bury, ch. 17.

52. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, translated by William Weaver (London: Picador, 1984), ch. ‘Night’.

53. Jeffrey Garrett, ‘Missing Eco: On Reading The Name of the Rose as Library Criticism’, Library Quarterly 61, no. 4 (October 1991), 373–88 (376).

54. Gladstone, ‘On Books and the Housing of Them’, 386.

55. Ibid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Geoffrey Scarre

Notes on contributor

Geoffrey Scarre is a professor in the Philosophy Department and has been a staff member at Durham University since 1989. In recent years he has taught and published mainly in moral theory and applied ethics, including the ethics of cultural heritage. In 2009 he was a co-founder of the Durham University Centre for the Ethics of Cultural Heritage (CECH). A lover of libraries, he is also a keen book collector.